PowerPC Games Hit Hard by OS X Lion

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Following Adobe in its footsteps, video games publisher Aspyr Media has issued a knowledge base article to highlight some problems posed by the latest version of Apple’s desktop operating system - OS X Lion.

As previously reported, Mac OS X version 10.7 completely drops support for Rosetta, the PowerPC emulation environment that allowed PPC apps to run on Intel hardware.

Players of titles like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault War Chest, Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of WWII, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, and many others may have discovered that Lion renders their games completely useless.

“As you have probably heard, the new Mac OS (Lion) will not support Rosetta,” Aspyr says.

“Aspyr has been around for a long time, and we have plenty of titles that that were not updated to run Natively on Intel processors. Rosetta was part of the Mac OS that helped applications made for PowerPC Mac Processors to run on Intel Processors,” the Mac games publisher explains.

While some old titles have been made Universal (playable on both PPC and Intel processors) with patches, “For our users who still wish to run older non-Universal titles and have the latest Mac OS (10.7), we recommend creating a partitioned drive with an earlier version of MacOS so you can boot in the older OS and play these games using Rosetta emulation,” Aspyr’s advice goes.